According to Mickey Spillane’s friend and posthumous collaborator Max Allan Collins, Spillane’s disappointment with producing the movie based on The Delta Factor was a major reason for Spillane setting aside his incomplete manuscript of the novel’s sequel, The Consummata.

Too bad Mickey was so disappointed, because this cheapie is in many ways a […]

A piece on Richard Stark and Elmore Leonard that I somehow missed a few months ago: http://t.co/HxBdwpoX # Peter Rozovsky at Detectives Beyond Borders–Darker Than Parker: http://t.co/gBtdB2p6 # Ken Salikof at NY Daily News–When New York was bad, the writing was good: http://t.co/BrgDrvfG […]

Ever-so-slightly off-topic with this one, but I know a fair few Violent World regulars appreciate a spot of spy fiction as well as crime fiction: I’ve just broken the news over on Existential Ennui that spy novelist Helen MacInnes—author of, among others, Above Suspicion, The Venetian Affair, and The Salzburg Connection […]

When I was looking for an image to swipe for my review of The Delta Factor by Mickey Spillane, I came across this review by Bill Crider (and I totally swiped the image). It does a good job of summing up the negatives, and some of the positives, of the novel to the […]

How does a respectable young woman fall into Los Angeles’ hard-boiled underworld?

Shadow-dodging through the glamorous world of 1950s Hollywood and its seedy flip side, Megan Abbott’s debut, Die a Little, is a gem of the darkest hue. This ingenious twist on a classic noir tale tells […]

Let’s return to Donald E. Westlake’s debut novel (“official” debut, that is; he had other pseudonymous sleaze works published before it), 1960’s The Mercenaries, a signed, inscribed British first edition of which I blogged about just over a week ago. I mentioned in that post that Violent World of Parker proprietor […]